Since the government passed the Right to
Education Act (RTE), the nation has been feverishly debating the tenets. Now
that the Supreme Court has validated the act, the reality has finally set in.
This act is law and thus, has to be implemented.
In the last few days may educators and
pundits have written about the RTE, from both positive and negative points of
view. As expected, Left leaning commentators like Mihir Sharma have lauded the
act, while others like Meeta Sengupta have been more critical (see here, and
here). Basically in a simplified fashion, the points for and against the act
are these:
For
- India is an elitist country and quality education has been restricted to a few. The RTE democratises education.
- Schools that have taken government aid or land at subsidised rates have a duty to abide by government rules and policies. In any case the government already mandates many rules for private schools.
- Education needs to be more democratic to give real life lessons to kids. In foreign countries, every one studies together regardless of social background.
- It is the duty of private citizens to provide for their less fortunate brethren in terms of education, in terms of increased fees.
Against
- This is forced social engineering. You cannot put different societies into a room together and force them to get along. There will be grave adjustment issues.
- The government should not have a say in what private schools do or who they admit, especially since they are not helping in any way.
- The law is illogical and un-implementable. There are too many unanswered questions and the government has taken no step in trying to even provide a practical approach to addressing them.
- The government is outsourcing, free of cost, its duties of educating society, while not caring about abysmal standards of its own schools.
- The school fees of children in private schools will increase, as they will have to subsidize 25% extra children and the school will obviously pass the burden on to them. This will cause a huge burden to middle-class families who struggle to send their children to private schools.
Personally, while I understand the social
concern, and support the concept of egalitarian education, I find the the law to be more theoretical than practical. I feel it's badly thought out, badly framed, and has little connection to the real world it will impact. There are little or no guidelines for implementation, and based on the Education Minister's remarks it would seem that the law will be implemented, in most cases, on a wing and a prayer. Supporters of the law could call me biased and there's a case to be made for that, since I send my
daughter to a private English medium school, automatically catapulting me to
the ranks of the “elite”. However, my attempt is, independent of personal preferences, to see how best it can be implemented. The law is passed and the die has been cast. I am more focused on the addressing the real-world problems that implementation will undoubtedly throw up.
Implementation
It has to be implemented, we all know that now. The question is - what is the most effective (I was admonished for using the word "painless") in a previous draft) method in which it can be implemented to the best benefit of everyone it affects? What are the practical ramifications of the law? Most importantly,
what practical measures can a school take to ensure compliance with the least
amount of disruption? I think there are three main angles that need to be considered
by schools while implementing the RTE. These pertain to Social, Educational,
and Financial disparities between the children.
1. Educational Disparity
Adjustment issues can be mitigated by initially
creating a separate section for underprivileged children. Now please note, I am
not advocating segregation. What the separate section will do is provide a path
to gradually assimilating them to a new culture and way of schooling they might
not have been used to in the past. This will work like a remedial education class, with the objective that after a fixed time period, say a year at most, all the children will be integrated into mixed classrooms.
The temporary separate academic activities for
the underprivileged kids, would ensure that the teachers can concentrate on coaching them
to knowledge and skill levels equivalent to an ‘elite’ child before they can
study together. This will ensure that the poor kids do not feel inferior or
insecure at the beginning, and also that the class is not interrupted while the
teacher has to repeatedly explain linguistic concepts to some kids, where the
others are proficient already.
2. Social Disparity
Along with education, the school will also
have to ensure that there is a path towards a future where the social
disparities between the children do not impact their growth and education
negatively. This is easier said than done because class biases are frequently
ingrained in children from an early age on both sides of the social tracks.
However, children are also very adaptable and far more willing to abandon their
biases when presented with the correct opportunities and education – both by
teachers and parents. One way of doing this effectively is through sporting
activities.
It is my belief that even as the academics
is disaggregated at the beginning via different classrooms, the games/sports time
SHOULD be spent together, giving the kids from different social and financial
level/strata an opportunity to interact while at their most equal, carefree,
and happiest. And it has been observed,
and you might agree, that children bond best while playing together without
being influenced by social encumbrances. Other non-academic areas of
integration would include cultural activities – music, singing, poetry, and
dramatics – where all kids can participate at equal levels. This non-academic
interaction will foster a healthy respect for each other’s abilities and
talents outside of the pressure of academic comparisons and performance.
This phased integration will help in ensuring that the “culture shock” is reduced and dispersed over a period of a a few months (maybe a year at most) and the children can ease into studying, and interacting with each other on an equal basis.
3. Financial Disparity
One of the elephants in the room that “elite”
parents fear but don’t talk about, except in the safe confines of their living
rooms, is the fear of their kids being targeted because of their financial
status. This targeting, they fear, can take the form of snatched away food from
tiffin boxes, or stolen watches, compass boxes, pens etc. This fear, however unfounded, makes them hesitate to put their kids in mixed settings.
While this fear might rarely realized in
practical life, there still is the possibility that a "poor" child will be
enticed at the sight of a shiny new compass box that his parents would not be
able to afford him/her, especially given the predilection of rich parents nowadays
to gift expensive baubles to the apples of their eyes to prove their love on a continuing
basis.
The only effective way to address this bias is for
the school to decree that the students not carry any item to school that be
above a certain monetary value. The school can, for example, mandate a couple
of brands of reasonably priced compass boxes that everyone should purchase. The
same goes for notebooks, calculators etc. Kids have no need of wearing watches
in junior school, in any case. Cellphones and PlayStations should be banned
outright. Many schools have actually implemented this
rule already, with fair success. Now this will have to be done not just as a
nice-to-have, but a need-to-have.
Conclusion
I feel these measures would ensure that the
act can be implemented with the least amount of disruption in the educational
lives of our children. It is not going to be easy, and there will be many
barriers to the successful implementation of the RTE, but since implementation
is imminent, the best way to do it is in a planned, calm, and practical manner.
To do this we have to both confront and address our experiences, biases, and
conditioning and take measures to mitigate as many possible problems as we can
think of.
Finally, I sincerely believe that the
school boards like (ICSE, CBSE, the state and international boards will have to
get into the act to ensure that their curriculum is amended to address the new
requirements. Innovations like multi-track curricula, incorporation of regional
language education into the main curriculum, and flexible scientific testing
will be needed to allow all children to perform at a certain level. It is only
when the curricula are flexible enough to adapt itself to changing realities
that the act will really be successful in implementation.
